tter, which suggested this dainty query. I can't help laughing at
the thoughts of your face and mine; and our anxiety to keep the
Aristarch in good humour during the _early_ part of a compotation,
till we got drunk enough to make him 'a speech.' I think the critic
would have much the best of us--of one, at least--for I don't think
diffidence (I mean social) is a disease of yours."

[Footnote 72: The verses enclosed were those melancholy ones, now
printed in his works, "There's not a joy the world can give like those
it takes away."]

[Footnote 73: The MS. was in the handwriting of Lady Byron.]

[Footnote 74: These allusions to "a speech" are connected with a little
incident, not worth mentioning, which had amused us both when I was in
town. He was rather fond (and had been always so, as may be seen in his
early letters,) of thus harping on some conventional phrase or joke.]

* * * * *

LETTER 217. TO MR. MOORE.

"March 8. 1815.

"An event--the death of poor Dorset--and the recollection of what I
once felt, and ought to have felt now, but could not--set me
pondering, and finally into the train of thought which you have in
your hands. I am very glad you like them, for I flatter myself they
will pass as an imitation of your style. If I could imitate it
well, I should have no great ambition of originality--I wish I
could make you exclaim with Dennis, 'That's my thunder, by G----d!'
I wrote them with a view to your setting them, and as a present to
Power, if he would accept the words, and _you_ did not think
yourself degraded, for once in a way, by marrying them to music.

"Sun-burn N * *!--why do you always twit me with his vile Ebrew
nasalities? Have I not told you it was all K.'s doing, and my own
exquisite facility of temper? But thou wilt be a wag, Thomas; and
see what you get for it. Now for my revenge.

"Depend--and perpend--upon it that your opinion of * *'s poem will
travel through one or other of the quintuple correspondents, till
it reaches the ear, and the liver of the author.[75] Your
adventure, however, is truly laughable--but how could you be such
a potatoe? You 'a brother' (of the quill) too, 'near the throne,'
to confide to a man's _own publisher_ (who has 'bought,' or rather
sold, 'golden opinions' about him) such a damnatory parenthes